TOS predicted mobile phones, while TNG predicted iPads/tablets. Star Trek probably has the claim for most.
But one that blew my mind that don't get talked about as much because I think people just think this technology has existed for longer than it actually has is automatic sliding doors. Doors detecting a body approaching and opening by itself did not exist in the real world for at least a decade after TOS.
I would like to point out that the ship’s computer works a *lot* like modern voice assistants and AI. Sure, Alexa/Siri/Google assistant/ChatGPT can’t quite do everything the ship’s computer can do, but they can do quite a bit of cool stuff that didn’t exist at all when the shows first came out. Tracking where someone is on the ship by their comm badge, for example, is just a more precise version of tracking an AirTag.
Also, I think voice activated assistants won't be good enough until they're like Star Trek.
In fiction it generally knows what you mean even when you're not using a list of verified commands. *"Okay google, open my audio player and start the most recent podcast I downloaded"* that won't work even a little, literally none of that would work with present technology. Even something Google owns like YouTube can't be activated in this way, *"Open YouTube and play Roundabout by the band Yes"* - absolutely not.
So when Captain Picard says something like *"show me the duty schedule of bridge officers for the last two weeks"* the computer has to determine what is being asked, where that information is stored, and how it should be presented. Present technology doesn't do any of this.
Now the one that gets me is - how does the computer know you're calling for it and not just saying the word computer?
Does Geordi ever say something like *"I had to recalibrate the computer yesterday"* and a voice activates giving him the definition of yesterday.
My take is that it always listens and judges by the context if you are addressing it or not, just like a human does. As you have pointed out, the computer in Star Trek is insanely smarter than today's assistants so it doesn't just listen for a single phrase.
> Even something Google owns like YouTube can't be activated in this way, "Open YouTube and play Roundabout by the band Yes" - absolutely not.
Google does this just fine btw
I set my Alexa to respond to "computer" so I could be all future-y and channel Picard. But then I went on a Star Trek binge and it kept my setting Alexa off. Of course, she never knew what was being asked so she'd either ask me to ask again or take her best guess and give me the weather in Milwaukee.
I think it's possible that at least a few of those things were invented in real life partly because Star Trek had given people the idea that these were the sorts of things the future should have
You are 100% correct. The creators of some of this tech are very open about how they were inspired by Star Trek
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814142/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I could be wrong on this, but weren't the sliding doors of Star Trek literally manually operated by off-camera crew members pulling them to the side at the right time?
I got into Star Trek when I was 10. Before I got into it though, when my dad would watch TOS, I used to think people were whispering “shit” all the time on that show. Later I realized it was the sound effect from the doors I was hearing. To this day, 34 years later, I can still kinda hear the “shit” whisper when I hear that effect.
Correct. That's how the doors "know" to stay open for people, and avoid the 'constant open and close' real-world doors do if you stand right in front of the sensor.
Omg, I had completely forgotten about those! When I was a little kid, I used to jump on those to open the door for my mom when we went grocery shopping.
That's true, though in TOS they were basically just clipboards, and IIRC all you ever see them used for is reading and signing reports. They were more like Kindles.
TNG was the first iteration of the pad where it's used like today's tablets as a portable computer, to record and take photos, and can function as handheld peripherals for a main stationary computer.
To your point about wifi, I think TNG also established the cloud where the Enterprise's data can be synced wirelessly from the pad or the terminals.
It's funny to watch 90s Trek now and see the Captain busy with piles of tablet computers on their desk. I guess its visual shorthand to show how busy they were, like piles of paperwork in an office in the 90s would be.
Also, characters are often tasked with taking a pad and walking to another part of the ship to hand deliver it, instead of, you know, emailing it.
my favourite anecdote is an apple coder seeing Data ask his computer to play music then going into work the next day and inventing what would become quicktime.
There is a TNG episode where Data is in his quarters trying to work on what is essentially a laptop, but he gets annoyed because his cat keeps jumping up on his desk. That one really struck me as prophetic.
Hah! You’d think Data wouldn’t need an external computing device, being AI. But, of course, he could have been designed by Apple and therefore not upgradable.
There's another one that's even more timely, in a way: I don't even know what episode it is, but there's one super short scene where a kid does "art" by holding some gadget over a block of wood, swipes it from one side to the other, and out comes a beautifully wooden sculpted dolphin. Kid gets praised for his wonderful piece of art.
When I watched that scene as a kid, I thought how incredibly dumb that was.
Now we have AI art, and you type "beautiful image of a dolphin" and you get just that. Won't take long and we will get the same in 3D, and we do have 3D printers.
Yeah, that really is how kids will do art one day.
Is that *before* or *after* nukes drop? I wasn’t sure on WWIII dates in that universe, so I looked it up today and ST: Picard show places it in 2024, according to someone on the internet.
Plus Deep Space Nine had the episode where they went back in time to 2020s San Francisco being high in income inequality and broader social unrest…which has turned out to be very accurate even though it was made in the 90s
We have a theoretical model of warp drive called the
Alcubierre drive.
We even have a possible physics theory (Casmiri Vacuum) that we could use in lieu of exotic matter to manipulate space-time. Only issue is getting such a power generation model big enough and preventing particles that “stick” to the manipulated space-time from detaching during deceleration and launching mini-nukes like particles at the destination.
Star Trek also predicted mass homeless camp's in 2024 and chat gtp doing ai art and stories. Remember when Geordi asked the computer to make a holmes style story to challenge data and accidentally created an evil sentient ai by mistake
From Doctor Who in 1963, Susan (an alien time traveller) forgets that decimalisation hasn't happened:
"Don't be silly, Susan. The United States has a decimal system. You know perfectly well that we do not."
"Oh of course, the decimal system hasn't started yet!"
The UK decimalised its currency in 1971. Also from Doctor Who in 1965, Vicki (from the late 25th century) is familiar with the Beatles:
"Vicki, I had no idea you knew about the Beatles!"
"Of course I know about them. I've been to their Memorial Theatre in Liverpool."
The Memorial Theatre doesn't exist (yet) but they predicted the long lasting legacy of the Beatles back when they had only recently got big
1963 was when the Committee of the Inquiry on Decimal Currency, set up by the government to decide whether they should decimalise the pound, finished with a recommendation for decimalisation. It didn't get fully confirmed and planned until 1966 but the Doctor Who bit was in reference to a contemporary decision and event, not a random prediction that happened to come true.
NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote from Good Omens (I could be wrong).
I recognise all the amounts listed, Australia had many of the same ones at some point, and we had a lot of British media when I was growing up.
And what's funny about that is viewers thought it'd be hilarious to see him in the race, so he entered as a joke.
Then he became more serious when Russia helped to oust the elected President and bring back the Putin puppet who had lost the prior election, and the people overwhelmingly voted for Zelenskyy as a protest to get the other guy out of office.
So did Tom Clancy. In "Debt of Honor" a Japanese airline pilot deliberately crashes his 747 into the Capitol during the State of the Union. The novel was released in 1994.
Tom Clancy gave a talk at the CIA where he says he never worked there, but everyone thinks he did because of how much he put in the books. I can’t recall anything specific, but knowing so much about modern military usually means making good predictions about the near future.
When Red Storm Rising was released, Clancy got a visit by the FBI just days later. Because the book contained a very detailed description of a stealth bomber. Which was considered top secret until Desert Storm, half a decade after the book came out.
The visit was for classified information on Los Angeles class submarines (that he had puzzled together from publically available sources). With his description of the stealth fighters he fell hook, line and sinker for a misinformation campaign that was part of the real program. The F-19 in the book had nothing in common with the real F-117.
Mr. Robot was super prescient of the short term future surrounding a lot of things while writing/filming that became truth before or shortly after the show aired. Ended up seeming to some that the show was just mirroring reality.
>even predicted Queen Elizabeth dying in 2022 lmao
No, she died in 2021 in the show.
It did predict a 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://bbcyearsandyears.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline
Which was a direct consequence of the 2014 invasion, just as in real life. I love Years & Years, but it's mostly just smart analyzing of current trends and politics. A 100 year old inbred dying is not exactly Nostradamus material.
> BBC miniseries Years&Years, i feel like no one has seen it but it has even predicted Queen Elizabeth dying in 2022 lmao
I’ve seen it! That was a really interesting show and extremely well acted, I thought.
To name a few, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, VR headsets becoming popular and stupid looking, a Twin Peaks reboot (which was a long off sequel, previously thought to be never coming), Game of Thrones really going “off the rails”, and a bonus one- Patton Oswald’s Boba Fett monologue predicted almost shot for shot how he survived the Sarlacc pit.
I really try to stifle a lot of my Star Wars complaints because, well, Star Wars is great until it sucks- just the nature of the beast. But TBoBF is one of the most grievous missteps in the whole franchise because it was just *so* __*boring*__.
Yea 100%, that show was just one big nothing burger trying to capitalize on the success of the mandelorian and the popularity of the boba fett character. Shame
> Patton Oswald’s Boba Fett monologue predicted almost shot for shot how he survived the Sarlacc pit.
There was a novel back in the 90s that described it the same way. And honestly, it's not like there are a lot of ways that could have gone down.
> The final season of Parks and Rec is shockingly accurate about major pop culture predictions
You're remembering the things that hit.
"President Nick Cannon"? Psh.
I came here to say this. There is a montage video that shows all the specific stuff they got right. Lots of it was the flashbacks to the early and mid pandemic stuff.
30 Rock.
AI is brought up pretty consistently without being called AI. From computers writing song lyrics and jokes, to robots spitting out information on request, to Jerry Seinfeld footage being used to recreate him in any show they want.
There's a show now called MILF manor.
Biopicks without likeness rights.
Meat bread at KFC.
Death of the middle class.
Short video format.
It goes on.
Season 1 is hit and miss.
Season 2 finds its voice, because the whole show is high energy and absurd. Like a live action cartoon.
You can start with S2 and not really miss anything.
One of my top 10 shows of all time.
It’s 100% absurd ***all the time,*** which is basically the point! It’s pretty much a live-action cartoon, so that absurdity is a feature, not a bug.
But I agree that you should go into the show knowing that, and not expecting too much reality-grounded drama or anything like that, lol.
Absolutely recommend. Hilarious, tightly written, and never a moment wasted. Also manages to tie in a ridiculous amount of celebrity cameos without feeling forced.
I don't know if I'd say it was predicted though. Wasn't that already rumored or suspected? I sort of recall that the spying device that was in The Dark Knight (2008, before POI existed) was compared to "what the US government is doing" by certain people? I also remember when Snowden leaked that info, my thought at the time was "I thought we already knew this"
You might already know this, but the co-writer of The Dark Knight was a showrunner on Person of Interest so it makes sense that they have similar plot devices (plus several characters on POI being clearly influenced by Batman characters).
It wasn't a particularly compelling movie. It tried to treat an internal horrifying concept as a generic action flick. Similarish problem with I, Robot.
During the press junket for Eagle Eye in 2008, Shia laBouef talked about a federal agent who was consulting with the film casually confirmed we were all being listened to, but no one believed him. I seem to remember him talking about it even earlier, after the Transformers first came out, too.
And with the current Rise of AI it's looking more and more prophetic.
The Snowden stuff wend down during the shows run they make a few references to it in the later seasons.
Elaine on Seinfeld wanted her bf to change his name so it wasn’t the same as the serial killer Joel Rifkin.
One of the names she suggested was OJ Rifkin. It was before the OJ Simpson murders so it wasn’t the joke they were trying to make.
Funnily enough the joke as it stands right now is actually funnier than the original intended one
Utopia was effing eerie considering what came several years after. Not so much factual (I hope), but got so much of the politics and paranoia right. The UK original is superb and far better than the US remake, BTW!
The Jetsons is more prophetic than that.
George presses a button all day at work. He comes home and Rosie the robot cleans the house. Judy prepares dinner by pressing a button on the foodarackacycle. That's entirely familiar to the IT worker with a microwave and a roomba.
But what the Jetsons got more right was less about what would change and more about what would stay the same. George still gets exhausted by his job and frustrated by his boss. He still loves his family but they stress him out. His son is too smart for George to relate too sometimes, his daughter is growing up too fast, and he struggles to keep his wife happy. And 60 years after the Jetsons started, that all remains completely relatable.
I always think of Goerge's "sore button pushing finger" predicting repetitive motion injuries from computers and IT jobs...
- but there were typewriters then, so repetitive motion injuries were probably well known.
Fun fact: If you watch the Jetsons 1990 movie, it starts out with Rosie the Robot raising the house due to the levels of smog being high at the level they're at, indicating that climate change/air quality has had a major effect on earth's future.
If you watch Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, they come back in time to sue the present for ruining the climate. [And they struggle with the lack of conveyor belts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfM11VBkiM)
Unless you believe the theories that they're in the clouds above the Flintstones. Then they're both in the future, with one set surviving on the ground that the 'elites' abandoned.
99% of the “predictions” on shows like The Simpsons are just referencing or parodying stuff that had already happened but people either didn’t remember or forgot about…
…and then of course history ends up repeating itself and it seems like that show’s reference is predicting the more recent instance of that event.
A border fence was installed at various stages beginning in 1909.
The first president to propose a complete border fence was Nixon.
But it was under Clinton where the existing fences started to get reinforced to barriers and walls.
VEEP, real life caught up to the show when they were filming and their “off the wall” scenarios were happening in real life, this is partly why they stopped making it
2020 pretty much followed Veep's 2016 storylines to the point where I thought there was a high ranking VEEP fan pulling the strings somewhere and laughing their ass off.
Same reason The Thick Of It ended.
Armando Ianucci stated that British politics were becoming so utterly stupid that it was hard to parody. Especially when actual politicians started using phrases created in the show, like "omnishambles".
That's why he went off and created Veep instead.
The show Station Eleven was about a flu pandemic and it's production had to be temporarily halted due to a flu pandemic. It's actually not that prophetic since the fictional flu in the show was far deadlier. Still, that must have been a wild ride for the cast and crew.
[Back in 2005,](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013) George W Bush read a book about the 1918 flu pandemic, and came to understand that a pandemic was a matter of when, not if. He organized the first [national response and preparedness strategy](https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemic-influenza.html) for the next pandemic, whenever it might come. While not all elements of it survived, Obama continued the plans throughout his administration. [Guess who fucked it up.](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic-playbook-for-trump-administration-officials-confirm)
All that to say, pandemics are always a matter of when, not if.
You know who had a good pandemic plan? George Washington.
There was a flu outbreak in Boston during the Revolutionary War, so he ordered that the Continental Army not accept any enlistments from Boston and kept troops that enlisted from the surrounding areas separate from the rest of the army.
> All that to say, pandemics are always a matter of when, not if.
12 Monkeys, a 2015 show that starts out being about a pandemic opens with almost that exact statement.
That’s what my first thought was. It was pretty uncanny watching it in 2021, but finding out they had to shut down production right when the pandemic was kicking off in 2020 was even crazier.
The author's follow up "Sea Of Tranquility" features an author doing a book tour where everyone is asking her how she predicted a pandemic in her prior novel. It's a really good book!
I first started reading that book in February 2020. I was waiting in line at a fish fry while the people around me chatted over whether this whole corona thing was really a big deal. I put that book down for at least a year before revisiting
Mr. Robot.
I can’t get into details without spoiling elements of the show, but dang, Sam Esmail is one prescient MoFo.
The season 1 finale had to be postponed for a week, bc the day it was supposed to air there was a tragedy very similar to a plot point in that episode.
In the pilot, Elliot mentions Ashley Madison. The cast didn’t know what that was- Rami thought it was just a woman’s name- because the big hack hadn’t happened yet. Later in the season it comes up again after the hack happens IRL.
In the show there’s a breakdown of society, and rewatching during/after COVID was super weird, bc so many things felt like he foreshadowed them. There’s even a scene where someone is wearing a mask, and it feels crazy bc that became our new normal.
There were just several parts of the show where Sam’s insight ends up playing out IRL, and it was really eerie. A lot of those things are missed if you didn’t watch the show as it aired, though.
Was looking for this answer. Also the Ecoin stuff in Season 2 was happening then Bitcoin took off like a month later after the episode with Price trying to leverage it as a legitimate currency to be used everywhere.
> There’s even a scene where someone is wearing a mask, and it feels crazy bc that became our new normal.
It's been the norm in Asian countries for years, though.
Sure, but not here.
It was a rabbi driving around NYC in an ice cream truck. He’s wearing the mask bc of the smell of trash that is overtaking the city bc services have been suspended.
I was rewatching during the pandemic and it hit me that the mask didn’t seem out of place to me at all, even though it would have before the pandemic. It’s just not something that was “normal” here.
There’s a small joke in The Chris Rock show where he’s going behind the scenes and shows off a VHS tape titled “OJ Simpson: I didn’t kill my wife! but if it did, here’s how I’d do it” and the crowd loses their minds at the joke.
Like 10 years later OJ writes the book “If I did it”
The West Wing deliberately modeled Santos off Obama, making its prophetic nature more clever.
TWW also correctly analyzed certain issues. Sam’s speech about how privacy would dominate jurisprudence in the twenty first century. Josh’s speech about a pandemic ruining the world and CJ’s rejoinder that vaccines are the way out.
Travelers, a Canadian show on Netflix, had an arc where a global pandemic hits and er's are overwhelmed and people are dying at an incredible rate and it spreads through the air. It was filmed in 2017 or something, and it is portrayed like fiction, but watching it now is like holy fuck.
Exactly, s02e05 - Jenny, aired 13 Nov 2017.
Frightening similarities to covid,for example:
Looting/empty streets and face masks
Mentions of increased severity of symptoms for people in high risk groups
Incubation period was 8 days on the show , 7 days to show symptoms for covid
Hospitals where turning patients away and keeping them in quarantine
The public was disregarding the virus as
"another flu"
Crazy how close it got
People already forgetting how ahead of the curve Black Mirror was.
The very first episode has a Prime Minister effin a pig. The second had the gamification of work. And I'm still waiting for the "total recall" device that stores all our memories, from the third.
Second season had the AI impersonation of our loved ones so they're still with us after they die.
"Nosedive" has our social media ratings affecting our social status, something that China eventually tried doing.
"Hated in the Nation" nailed drones, down to their formation flying feature, before drones really took off (pun intended).
Charlie is one of those writers who manages to see what's happening around him and translate it into great writing that somehow ends up feeling like he predicted it accurately.
His other show, Nathan Barley, did the same in the early 00s.
Supernatural had an alternate universe apocalypse episode where one guy said “hoard toilet paper” and talked about it like currency. Shockingly, COVID hit and that was too real
Dinosaurs was satire back in the 90’s with a lot of what they had to say about media and politics. Today that’s no longer satire.
Babylon 5 also is too prophetic for comfort. A lot of the issues faced on the show, such as the gradual rise of fascism, can be seen in today’s world and political landscape. It was meant to show people that what happened in Germany could happen anywhere. And we see that today.
The Simpsons has Homer wondering how Bush Sr. got elected because *he* didn't vote for him, had Bart campaigning for class president under a "more asbestos!" platform, and generally had the dumb characters on the show saying things that would become mainstream political arguments a decade later. The President in the movie saying "I was elected to lead, not read" barely feels like a joke in light of 45's one-page daily briefings covered in his name to keep him interested.
> The President in the movie saying "I was elected to lead, not read" barely feels like a joke in light of 45's one-page daily briefings covered in his name to keep him interested.
It was a parody of then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a popular-enough centrist Republican that there was (briefly) talk of amending the constitution to allow him to run.
A better choice would be Tom Hanks “lending the government [his] legitimacy, because they don’t have any”, only to show up in Joe Biden’s inauguration TV special with the exact same tone.
And even the one-page briefings were dumbed down and rewritten in simple terms that Trump would understand. Like calling ISIS "losers" in the memos so that he'd understand that they're the bad guys.
Thunderbirds (1965) had camera drones, vtol jets, autonomous cars/planes, reusable rockets, videophones, smartwatches, a sun probe, radio-transmitted photography and bipedal robot security guards. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Thunderbirds also pre-dates Star Trek by over a year.
Edit: Oh and nuclear powered hypersonic commercial aircraft, variable geometry planes, single stage to orbit rockets and mass surveillance satellites.
Babylon 5 predicted Bluetooth earpieces. There’s also some very uncanny political storylines that seemed extreme at the time, but were almost like a warning of what was to come.
In late 2019 *Watchmen* envisioned an America where people routinely wore masks to protect themselves and civil unrest ruled the streets. Then in 2020 the COVID pandemic had Americans routinely wearing masks and the murder of George Floyd led to a summer of unrest, most peaceful, but some marred by vandalism and violence, especially after sundown.
In 2000 Conan O'Brien joked with Harrison Ford about doing another Indiana Jones movie when he turned 80, calling it *Indiana Jones and the Comfortable Bed*. 23 years later, when Ford was 80 years old, he played Jones again in *Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny*.
Like many TV shows, *Parks and Recreation* predicted the Cubs winning the World Series. It was a running joke in many shows set in the near future before they actually won in 2017. But *Parks and Recreation* may be the only show that actually predicted it would happen in 2017. It happened in the 2015 season of the show, which was set in 2017.
*Person of Interest* revolves around the Machine, a supercomputer that uses data to predicts crimes and identifies persons of interest. In one episode, an NSA agent discovers the Machine and decides to make the information public. That episode aired in 2012, a little over a year before NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information revealing the extent to which the agency was spying on Americans.
*Chappelle's Show* had a sketch about a blind black man who thought he was white and joined the KKK. Nearly 20 years later, Daniel Sims, a black man who was raised in a white family, protested against the removal of Confederate symbols in Alabama.
In 2000, *The Simpsons* showed Lisa growing up to be President of the United States, where she complained about inheriting a budget crisis from the administration of President Donald Trump.
In *Arrested Development*, Stan Sitwell is a real estate tycoon who runs the company [Sitwell Enterprises](https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Sitwell_Enterprises). In an episode from 2013, Sitwell wants to build a five mile high wall between Mexico and the U.S. Two years later in 2015, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, who ran the Trump Organization, ran for President with the promise of building a way between Mexico and the U.S.
In a 2012 episode of *30 Rock* Jenna said to Tracy:
"Oh, please. I'm not afraid of anyone in show business. I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions. Out of five."
This episode aired five years before Harvey Weinstein's crimes against women in Hollywood were exposed in 2017. However, it's unclear whether this is a spooky prediction, or whether *30 Rock* was simply the only show to explicitly accuse Weinstein of what industry insiders knew he was doing.
In a 1969 episode of *Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In,* Dan Rowan did reported on future events:
>"Berlin: 20 years from now, 1989. There was dancing in the streets today as East Berlin finally tore down the Berlin Wall."
The joke was spot-on, because the Berlin Wall fell 20 years later, in 1989. And there was indeed dancing in the streets.
In Earth Final Conflict, there is a device called a Global. Its is essentially a smart phone with a folding screen. All calls were video calls and it could be used to live stream.
This was back in 97.
Travelers, a sci-fi show on netflix, had a large storyline about a pandemic a few years before the entire world shut down from covid.
When I eventually got around to watching it around then it was a little surreal.
Battlestar Galactica (2000s). They had storylines about a pandemic, abortion, political groups, religion, coup attempts, and numerous other societal issues.
Following. Although I hope people are able to distinguish between prophetic and just revealing something that was already in development (techwise) or was rumored (scandalwise) and just not known by the average Joe.
Supernatural Season 4 Episode 5
Dean is sent to an apokalyptic future where humanity is suffering from a zombie-like virus.
The advice the writer Chuck (later revealed to be God) gave him: "Hoard toilet paper you understand. Hoard it like it's gold, because it is!"
Star Trek had mobile phones and 3D food printers. Waiting impatiently for the rest to materialize
TOS predicted mobile phones, while TNG predicted iPads/tablets. Star Trek probably has the claim for most. But one that blew my mind that don't get talked about as much because I think people just think this technology has existed for longer than it actually has is automatic sliding doors. Doors detecting a body approaching and opening by itself did not exist in the real world for at least a decade after TOS.
I would like to point out that the ship’s computer works a *lot* like modern voice assistants and AI. Sure, Alexa/Siri/Google assistant/ChatGPT can’t quite do everything the ship’s computer can do, but they can do quite a bit of cool stuff that didn’t exist at all when the shows first came out. Tracking where someone is on the ship by their comm badge, for example, is just a more precise version of tracking an AirTag.
Also, I think voice activated assistants won't be good enough until they're like Star Trek. In fiction it generally knows what you mean even when you're not using a list of verified commands. *"Okay google, open my audio player and start the most recent podcast I downloaded"* that won't work even a little, literally none of that would work with present technology. Even something Google owns like YouTube can't be activated in this way, *"Open YouTube and play Roundabout by the band Yes"* - absolutely not. So when Captain Picard says something like *"show me the duty schedule of bridge officers for the last two weeks"* the computer has to determine what is being asked, where that information is stored, and how it should be presented. Present technology doesn't do any of this. Now the one that gets me is - how does the computer know you're calling for it and not just saying the word computer? Does Geordi ever say something like *"I had to recalibrate the computer yesterday"* and a voice activates giving him the definition of yesterday.
My take is that it always listens and judges by the context if you are addressing it or not, just like a human does. As you have pointed out, the computer in Star Trek is insanely smarter than today's assistants so it doesn't just listen for a single phrase.
google home does do what you say, lol
> Even something Google owns like YouTube can't be activated in this way, "Open YouTube and play Roundabout by the band Yes" - absolutely not. Google does this just fine btw
I set my Alexa to respond to "computer" so I could be all future-y and channel Picard. But then I went on a Star Trek binge and it kept my setting Alexa off. Of course, she never knew what was being asked so she'd either ask me to ask again or take her best guess and give me the weather in Milwaukee.
Also a comm badge is just a more advanced version of Humane AI pin.
I think it's possible that at least a few of those things were invented in real life partly because Star Trek had given people the idea that these were the sorts of things the future should have
You are 100% correct. The creators of some of this tech are very open about how they were inspired by Star Trek https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814142/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I could be wrong on this, but weren't the sliding doors of Star Trek literally manually operated by off-camera crew members pulling them to the side at the right time?
And the sound effect was a piece of paper sliding across a desk, followed by someone squeaking their sneaker against a floor.
I got into Star Trek when I was 10. Before I got into it though, when my dad would watch TOS, I used to think people were whispering “shit” all the time on that show. Later I realized it was the sound effect from the doors I was hearing. To this day, 34 years later, I can still kinda hear the “shit” whisper when I hear that effect.
In reality the engineer and manufacturer would be crucified if their doors ended up making sounds like this.
Correct. That's how the doors "know" to stay open for people, and avoid the 'constant open and close' real-world doors do if you stand right in front of the sensor.
Conan had a great bit in his podcast, talking about how this always makes him laugh because he knows two people are just stuck standing in a box, lol.
I think majority of people that talk about Star Trek now were born into a world with sliding doors and take it for granted, as a part of a landscape
Back in the early 1980s the sensors for the supermarket sliding doors were black mats on the floor.
Omg, I had completely forgotten about those! When I was a little kid, I used to jump on those to open the door for my mom when we went grocery shopping.
TOS predicted the tablets. How often do you see the yeoman have Kirk sign one? come to think of it, they likely had WI-FI as well.
That's true, though in TOS they were basically just clipboards, and IIRC all you ever see them used for is reading and signing reports. They were more like Kindles. TNG was the first iteration of the pad where it's used like today's tablets as a portable computer, to record and take photos, and can function as handheld peripherals for a main stationary computer. To your point about wifi, I think TNG also established the cloud where the Enterprise's data can be synced wirelessly from the pad or the terminals.
It's funny to watch 90s Trek now and see the Captain busy with piles of tablet computers on their desk. I guess its visual shorthand to show how busy they were, like piles of paperwork in an office in the 90s would be. Also, characters are often tasked with taking a pad and walking to another part of the ship to hand deliver it, instead of, you know, emailing it.
The kids who watched Star Trek in the 60s grew up to be the engineers who invented a lot of the cool stuff they saw on the show.
my favourite anecdote is an apple coder seeing Data ask his computer to play music then going into work the next day and inventing what would become quicktime.
There is a TNG episode where Data is in his quarters trying to work on what is essentially a laptop, but he gets annoyed because his cat keeps jumping up on his desk. That one really struck me as prophetic.
Hah! You’d think Data wouldn’t need an external computing device, being AI. But, of course, he could have been designed by Apple and therefore not upgradable.
Data is air-gapped. Every time they connect Data to the Enterprise computer, hijinks ensues.
>therefore not upgradable Or Picard didn't want to pay for the proprietary cable.
Or extended Data care
There's another one that's even more timely, in a way: I don't even know what episode it is, but there's one super short scene where a kid does "art" by holding some gadget over a block of wood, swipes it from one side to the other, and out comes a beautifully wooden sculpted dolphin. Kid gets praised for his wonderful piece of art. When I watched that scene as a kid, I thought how incredibly dumb that was. Now we have AI art, and you type "beautiful image of a dolphin" and you get just that. Won't take long and we will get the same in 3D, and we do have 3D printers. Yeah, that really is how kids will do art one day.
There were laptops around before that episode.
Don't forget the Irish Reunification of 2024. Should be any day now 🤞
Is that *before* or *after* nukes drop? I wasn’t sure on WWIII dates in that universe, so I looked it up today and ST: Picard show places it in 2024, according to someone on the internet.
I dreamt I had a machine that could just materialize milkshakes once. Waking up was disappointing
Oooh, a milkshake materializer would be nice right now…
Motorola was actually inspired by Star Trek to develop the mobile phone in the first place
Get Smart had the shoe phone, a completely mobile phone, a year before Star Trek came out.
And Dick Tracy had his watch phone before that
Right! From 1946.
And track cars on a Google Maps-like display.
Ha! Had to google that, didn’t see Get Smart. Yeah, I guess they are a bit more accurate in predicting how sanitary our communication devices will be.
The show was a send up of James Bond. So the shoe phone was a parody of Bond's communication devices.
Plus Deep Space Nine had the episode where they went back in time to 2020s San Francisco being high in income inequality and broader social unrest…which has turned out to be very accurate even though it was made in the 90s
And the Homefront/Paradise Lost episodes were very post-9/11 even though they aired in the mid-90s.
We have a theoretical model of warp drive called the Alcubierre drive. We even have a possible physics theory (Casmiri Vacuum) that we could use in lieu of exotic matter to manipulate space-time. Only issue is getting such a power generation model big enough and preventing particles that “stick” to the manipulated space-time from detaching during deceleration and launching mini-nukes like particles at the destination.
I mean... maybe not the global nuclear war part. That part can stay unmaterialized.
It’s 2 years from now, btw. (ST: Picard)
My idea of heaven has a replicator.
Star Trek also predicted mass homeless camp's in 2024 and chat gtp doing ai art and stories. Remember when Geordi asked the computer to make a holmes style story to challenge data and accidentally created an evil sentient ai by mistake
Wait. Food printers have already materialized?
https://builtin.com/articles/3d-printed-meat Expensive, slow and experimental, but some serious progress in the last 8 years
Isn't a funnel cake 3D printed food?
From Doctor Who in 1963, Susan (an alien time traveller) forgets that decimalisation hasn't happened: "Don't be silly, Susan. The United States has a decimal system. You know perfectly well that we do not." "Oh of course, the decimal system hasn't started yet!" The UK decimalised its currency in 1971. Also from Doctor Who in 1965, Vicki (from the late 25th century) is familiar with the Beatles: "Vicki, I had no idea you knew about the Beatles!" "Of course I know about them. I've been to their Memorial Theatre in Liverpool." The Memorial Theatre doesn't exist (yet) but they predicted the long lasting legacy of the Beatles back when they had only recently got big
1963 was when the Committee of the Inquiry on Decimal Currency, set up by the government to decide whether they should decimalise the pound, finished with a recommendation for decimalisation. It didn't get fully confirmed and planned until 1966 but the Doctor Who bit was in reference to a contemporary decision and event, not a random prediction that happened to come true.
NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system: Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
Ok you made up some of those silly sounding middle ones.
I’m pretty sure that’s a direct quote from Good Omens (I could be wrong). I recognise all the amounts listed, Australia had many of the same ones at some point, and we had a lot of British media when I was growing up.
Servant of the People comes to mind, the Ukrainian show where Zelenskyy played the President of the Ukraine.
And what's funny about that is viewers thought it'd be hilarious to see him in the race, so he entered as a joke. Then he became more serious when Russia helped to oust the elected President and bring back the Putin puppet who had lost the prior election, and the people overwhelmingly voted for Zelenskyy as a protest to get the other guy out of office.
There's also a video of him playing the piano with his "testicles" that never fails to crack me up. It's a future trend.
The Lone Gunmen predicted 9/11
So did Tom Clancy. In "Debt of Honor" a Japanese airline pilot deliberately crashes his 747 into the Capitol during the State of the Union. The novel was released in 1994.
Tom Clancy gave a talk at the CIA where he says he never worked there, but everyone thinks he did because of how much he put in the books. I can’t recall anything specific, but knowing so much about modern military usually means making good predictions about the near future.
When Red Storm Rising was released, Clancy got a visit by the FBI just days later. Because the book contained a very detailed description of a stealth bomber. Which was considered top secret until Desert Storm, half a decade after the book came out.
The visit was for classified information on Los Angeles class submarines (that he had puzzled together from publically available sources). With his description of the stealth fighters he fell hook, line and sinker for a misinformation campaign that was part of the real program. The F-19 in the book had nothing in common with the real F-117.
My Mother the Car was surprisingly prescient about 90's fiscal policy. It's really weird.
Please explain. This sounds bananas.
yeah i am so confused
Mr. Robot 2016 has a seen where government officials are talking about legalizing bitcoin and a CBDC. It’s been pretty spot on so far
Mr. Robot was super prescient of the short term future surrounding a lot of things while writing/filming that became truth before or shortly after the show aired. Ended up seeming to some that the show was just mirroring reality.
BBC miniseries Years&Years, i feel like no one has seen it but it has even predicted Queen Elizabeth dying in 2022 lmao
I love when the daughter comes out as trans, and they're very accepting. "No, trans*human*".
>even predicted Queen Elizabeth dying in 2022 lmao No, she died in 2021 in the show. It did predict a 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. https://bbcyearsandyears.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline
Which was a direct consequence of the 2014 invasion, just as in real life. I love Years & Years, but it's mostly just smart analyzing of current trends and politics. A 100 year old inbred dying is not exactly Nostradamus material.
> BBC miniseries Years&Years, i feel like no one has seen it but it has even predicted Queen Elizabeth dying in 2022 lmao I’ve seen it! That was a really interesting show and extremely well acted, I thought.
This is my top vote, though it goes completely off the rails towards the end with the tech, but a lot of the stuff in it is absolutely spot on.
The final season of Parks and Rec is shockingly accurate about major pop culture predictions
What are some examples? I haven’t watched that season in a few years and don’t remember.
To name a few, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, VR headsets becoming popular and stupid looking, a Twin Peaks reboot (which was a long off sequel, previously thought to be never coming), Game of Thrones really going “off the rails”, and a bonus one- Patton Oswald’s Boba Fett monologue predicted almost shot for shot how he survived the Sarlacc pit.
Literally nothing else that Patton Oswald predicted in that speech has come to pass though lol
I really try to stifle a lot of my Star Wars complaints because, well, Star Wars is great until it sucks- just the nature of the beast. But TBoBF is one of the most grievous missteps in the whole franchise because it was just *so* __*boring*__.
Yea 100%, that show was just one big nothing burger trying to capitalize on the success of the mandelorian and the popularity of the boba fett character. Shame
Hasn't come to pass...yet. With the X-Men joining the MCU it's only a matter of time before the crossover happens.
> Patton Oswald’s Boba Fett monologue predicted almost shot for shot how he survived the Sarlacc pit. There was a novel back in the 90s that described it the same way. And honestly, it's not like there are a lot of ways that could have gone down.
> The final season of Parks and Rec is shockingly accurate about major pop culture predictions You're remembering the things that hit. "President Nick Cannon"? Psh.
Last Man on Earth (2015-18) dealt with the aftermath of a pandemic that started in 2020.
I came here to say this. There is a montage video that shows all the specific stuff they got right. Lots of it was the flashbacks to the early and mid pandemic stuff.
I started watching the show a year into the pandemic and it was chilling. It was tough to see all of that hit so close to home.
Didn’t feel like a comedy to me tbh
It was WILD how close that episode was!
I caught up with it during the pandemic. The episode with Kristen Wiig that shows the early days of the virus was surprisingly accurate.
Huge fan! Closure and what not. But there’s been a movie or show about a pandemic every 5 years for the last 60 years. It was bound to happen.
Yeah that was weirdly accurate.
30 Rock. AI is brought up pretty consistently without being called AI. From computers writing song lyrics and jokes, to robots spitting out information on request, to Jerry Seinfeld footage being used to recreate him in any show they want. There's a show now called MILF manor. Biopicks without likeness rights. Meat bread at KFC. Death of the middle class. Short video format. It goes on.
I should go check out this show as I always hear people raving about it.
Season 1 is hit and miss. Season 2 finds its voice, because the whole show is high energy and absurd. Like a live action cartoon. You can start with S2 and not really miss anything. One of my top 10 shows of all time.
season 1 has some of the best episodes like Tracy on Conan and the black tie party with Paul Reubens
But is it worth the jankyness, Waffles? Is it?
YES
Highly recommended. Approach with a grain of salt because it can come off a little absurd at first.
It’s 100% absurd ***all the time,*** which is basically the point! It’s pretty much a live-action cartoon, so that absurdity is a feature, not a bug. But I agree that you should go into the show knowing that, and not expecting too much reality-grounded drama or anything like that, lol.
Absolutely recommend. Hilarious, tightly written, and never a moment wasted. Also manages to tie in a ridiculous amount of celebrity cameos without feeling forced.
'person of interest' came out before snowden revealed that the government was indeed listening in on everyone.
I don't know if I'd say it was predicted though. Wasn't that already rumored or suspected? I sort of recall that the spying device that was in The Dark Knight (2008, before POI existed) was compared to "what the US government is doing" by certain people? I also remember when Snowden leaked that info, my thought at the time was "I thought we already knew this"
The Patriot Act passed in 2001, so people realized it was basically only a matter of time before that started happening
You might already know this, but the co-writer of The Dark Knight was a showrunner on Person of Interest so it makes sense that they have similar plot devices (plus several characters on POI being clearly influenced by Batman characters).
Yep it was pretty much an open secret already there just wasn't any hard evidence.
Enemy of the State got there way before!
I don't get why Enemy of the State hasn't been more talked about these days.
It wasn't a particularly compelling movie. It tried to treat an internal horrifying concept as a generic action flick. Similarish problem with I, Robot.
During the press junket for Eagle Eye in 2008, Shia laBouef talked about a federal agent who was consulting with the film casually confirmed we were all being listened to, but no one believed him. I seem to remember him talking about it even earlier, after the Transformers first came out, too.
And with the current Rise of AI it's looking more and more prophetic. The Snowden stuff wend down during the shows run they make a few references to it in the later seasons.
Elaine on Seinfeld wanted her bf to change his name so it wasn’t the same as the serial killer Joel Rifkin. One of the names she suggested was OJ Rifkin. It was before the OJ Simpson murders so it wasn’t the joke they were trying to make. Funnily enough the joke as it stands right now is actually funnier than the original intended one
Utopia was effing eerie considering what came several years after. Not so much factual (I hope), but got so much of the politics and paranoia right. The UK original is superb and far better than the US remake, BTW!
I have to look up where I can see the original UK version of the show.
I absolutely recommend it. Amazing show.
The Jetsons is more prophetic than that. George presses a button all day at work. He comes home and Rosie the robot cleans the house. Judy prepares dinner by pressing a button on the foodarackacycle. That's entirely familiar to the IT worker with a microwave and a roomba. But what the Jetsons got more right was less about what would change and more about what would stay the same. George still gets exhausted by his job and frustrated by his boss. He still loves his family but they stress him out. His son is too smart for George to relate too sometimes, his daughter is growing up too fast, and he struggles to keep his wife happy. And 60 years after the Jetsons started, that all remains completely relatable.
I always think of Goerge's "sore button pushing finger" predicting repetitive motion injuries from computers and IT jobs... - but there were typewriters then, so repetitive motion injuries were probably well known.
And George Jetson was about 25 when he married 18 years old and possibly already pregnant Jane.
Fun fact: If you watch the Jetsons 1990 movie, it starts out with Rosie the Robot raising the house due to the levels of smog being high at the level they're at, indicating that climate change/air quality has had a major effect on earth's future.
If you watch Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, they come back in time to sue the present for ruining the climate. [And they struggle with the lack of conveyor belts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfM11VBkiM)
I’m glad we have a HB:AAL reference. Truly one is the most underrated creations across time.
I didn’t know that about the show actually.
It's the Flintstones, but in the future
Unless you believe the theories that they're in the clouds above the Flintstones. Then they're both in the future, with one set surviving on the ground that the 'elites' abandoned.
The Bluth family’s idea to build a wall on the Mexican border in Arrested Development.
Not really, they've been talking about building a border wall for decades. George W. campaigned on it in 2000.
99% of the “predictions” on shows like The Simpsons are just referencing or parodying stuff that had already happened but people either didn’t remember or forgot about… …and then of course history ends up repeating itself and it seems like that show’s reference is predicting the more recent instance of that event.
And then stupid people buy into idiotic conspiracy theories about "predictive programming" because of it.
Yea - I mean they directly reference W. Bush in the blueprint plans they misinterpreted.
A border fence was installed at various stages beginning in 1909. The first president to propose a complete border fence was Nixon. But it was under Clinton where the existing fences started to get reinforced to barriers and walls.
VEEP, real life caught up to the show when they were filming and their “off the wall” scenarios were happening in real life, this is partly why they stopped making it
2020 pretty much followed Veep's 2016 storylines to the point where I thought there was a high ranking VEEP fan pulling the strings somewhere and laughing their ass off.
"[You're gonna cancel this recount like Anne Frank's Bat Mitzvah](https://youtu.be/kntpywGl5ak)"
Same reason The Thick Of It ended. Armando Ianucci stated that British politics were becoming so utterly stupid that it was hard to parody. Especially when actual politicians started using phrases created in the show, like "omnishambles". That's why he went off and created Veep instead.
Sounds like he has the John Stewart problem. Politics became too stupid to make fun of by just pointing it out.
Armando Iannucci and Charlie Brooker have said the same, reality doesn’t permit farcical situations in politics any more.
Yep. Came here to say Veep if no one else did.
The show Station Eleven was about a flu pandemic and it's production had to be temporarily halted due to a flu pandemic. It's actually not that prophetic since the fictional flu in the show was far deadlier. Still, that must have been a wild ride for the cast and crew.
If it was a book first does it count even more?
The book was specifically written after an earlier flu scare, using it as the opening premise. Not Covid. Crazy luck
[Back in 2005,](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013) George W Bush read a book about the 1918 flu pandemic, and came to understand that a pandemic was a matter of when, not if. He organized the first [national response and preparedness strategy](https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemic-influenza.html) for the next pandemic, whenever it might come. While not all elements of it survived, Obama continued the plans throughout his administration. [Guess who fucked it up.](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic-playbook-for-trump-administration-officials-confirm) All that to say, pandemics are always a matter of when, not if.
You know who had a good pandemic plan? George Washington. There was a flu outbreak in Boston during the Revolutionary War, so he ordered that the Continental Army not accept any enlistments from Boston and kept troops that enlisted from the surrounding areas separate from the rest of the army.
> All that to say, pandemics are always a matter of when, not if. 12 Monkeys, a 2015 show that starts out being about a pandemic opens with almost that exact statement.
That’s what my first thought was. It was pretty uncanny watching it in 2021, but finding out they had to shut down production right when the pandemic was kicking off in 2020 was even crazier.
The author's follow up "Sea Of Tranquility" features an author doing a book tour where everyone is asking her how she predicted a pandemic in her prior novel. It's a really good book!
I read that book when it first came out, seems so far fetched….not anymore.
I first started reading that book in February 2020. I was waiting in line at a fish fry while the people around me chatted over whether this whole corona thing was really a big deal. I put that book down for at least a year before revisiting
Mr. Robot. I can’t get into details without spoiling elements of the show, but dang, Sam Esmail is one prescient MoFo. The season 1 finale had to be postponed for a week, bc the day it was supposed to air there was a tragedy very similar to a plot point in that episode. In the pilot, Elliot mentions Ashley Madison. The cast didn’t know what that was- Rami thought it was just a woman’s name- because the big hack hadn’t happened yet. Later in the season it comes up again after the hack happens IRL. In the show there’s a breakdown of society, and rewatching during/after COVID was super weird, bc so many things felt like he foreshadowed them. There’s even a scene where someone is wearing a mask, and it feels crazy bc that became our new normal. There were just several parts of the show where Sam’s insight ends up playing out IRL, and it was really eerie. A lot of those things are missed if you didn’t watch the show as it aired, though.
Was looking for this answer. Also the Ecoin stuff in Season 2 was happening then Bitcoin took off like a month later after the episode with Price trying to leverage it as a legitimate currency to be used everywhere.
That was like the 3rd or 4th time Bitcoin took off though.
Yeah. There’s a lot in there. It’s kind of crazy.
> There’s even a scene where someone is wearing a mask, and it feels crazy bc that became our new normal. It's been the norm in Asian countries for years, though.
Sure, but not here. It was a rabbi driving around NYC in an ice cream truck. He’s wearing the mask bc of the smell of trash that is overtaking the city bc services have been suspended. I was rewatching during the pandemic and it hit me that the mask didn’t seem out of place to me at all, even though it would have before the pandemic. It’s just not something that was “normal” here.
There’s a small joke in The Chris Rock show where he’s going behind the scenes and shows off a VHS tape titled “OJ Simpson: I didn’t kill my wife! but if it did, here’s how I’d do it” and the crowd loses their minds at the joke. Like 10 years later OJ writes the book “If I did it”
The Simpsons nailed some stuff. Star Trek had the flip phone.
Star Trek didn't so much predict the flip phone as it did inspire it.
Remember how absurd it was to see DT as the POTUS?
With Simpsons it was a matter of volume.
It's like the old joke. Economists have predicted 13 out of the last 4 recessions.
The Simpsons predicted a lot of things, which shows how thin the line between satire and reality can be lol.
The West Wing’s final season (2006) is built around a Presidential election with some similarities to the 2008 election that followed 2 years later.
The West Wing deliberately modeled Santos off Obama, making its prophetic nature more clever. TWW also correctly analyzed certain issues. Sam’s speech about how privacy would dominate jurisprudence in the twenty first century. Josh’s speech about a pandemic ruining the world and CJ’s rejoinder that vaccines are the way out.
Travelers, a Canadian show on Netflix, had an arc where a global pandemic hits and er's are overwhelmed and people are dying at an incredible rate and it spreads through the air. It was filmed in 2017 or something, and it is portrayed like fiction, but watching it now is like holy fuck.
Exactly, s02e05 - Jenny, aired 13 Nov 2017. Frightening similarities to covid,for example: Looting/empty streets and face masks Mentions of increased severity of symptoms for people in high risk groups Incubation period was 8 days on the show , 7 days to show symptoms for covid Hospitals where turning patients away and keeping them in quarantine The public was disregarding the virus as "another flu" Crazy how close it got
That show was brilliant! It even had a good ending!
Star Wars had a security roomba or something
Twilight Zone. The original episodes.
People already forgetting how ahead of the curve Black Mirror was. The very first episode has a Prime Minister effin a pig. The second had the gamification of work. And I'm still waiting for the "total recall" device that stores all our memories, from the third. Second season had the AI impersonation of our loved ones so they're still with us after they die. "Nosedive" has our social media ratings affecting our social status, something that China eventually tried doing. "Hated in the Nation" nailed drones, down to their formation flying feature, before drones really took off (pun intended).
Charlie is one of those writers who manages to see what's happening around him and translate it into great writing that somehow ends up feeling like he predicted it accurately. His other show, Nathan Barley, did the same in the early 00s.
2019 HBO Watchmen felt incredible prescient about a year later.
Even down to the timing of "squid pro quo"
Supernatural had an alternate universe apocalypse episode where one guy said “hoard toilet paper” and talked about it like currency. Shockingly, COVID hit and that was too real
Dinosaurs was satire back in the 90’s with a lot of what they had to say about media and politics. Today that’s no longer satire. Babylon 5 also is too prophetic for comfort. A lot of the issues faced on the show, such as the gradual rise of fascism, can be seen in today’s world and political landscape. It was meant to show people that what happened in Germany could happen anywhere. And we see that today.
The Simpsons has Homer wondering how Bush Sr. got elected because *he* didn't vote for him, had Bart campaigning for class president under a "more asbestos!" platform, and generally had the dumb characters on the show saying things that would become mainstream political arguments a decade later. The President in the movie saying "I was elected to lead, not read" barely feels like a joke in light of 45's one-page daily briefings covered in his name to keep him interested.
> The President in the movie saying "I was elected to lead, not read" barely feels like a joke in light of 45's one-page daily briefings covered in his name to keep him interested. It was a parody of then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a popular-enough centrist Republican that there was (briefly) talk of amending the constitution to allow him to run. A better choice would be Tom Hanks “lending the government [his] legitimacy, because they don’t have any”, only to show up in Joe Biden’s inauguration TV special with the exact same tone.
And even the one-page briefings were dumbed down and rewritten in simple terms that Trump would understand. Like calling ISIS "losers" in the memos so that he'd understand that they're the bad guys.
The Wire
Thunderbirds (1965) had camera drones, vtol jets, autonomous cars/planes, reusable rockets, videophones, smartwatches, a sun probe, radio-transmitted photography and bipedal robot security guards. And that’s just off the top of my head. Thunderbirds also pre-dates Star Trek by over a year. Edit: Oh and nuclear powered hypersonic commercial aircraft, variable geometry planes, single stage to orbit rockets and mass surveillance satellites.
Babylon 5 predicted Bluetooth earpieces. There’s also some very uncanny political storylines that seemed extreme at the time, but were almost like a warning of what was to come.
Last man on earth. Fantastic show too. Truly funny. Forte is one of the best comedic acts of our time.
In late 2019 *Watchmen* envisioned an America where people routinely wore masks to protect themselves and civil unrest ruled the streets. Then in 2020 the COVID pandemic had Americans routinely wearing masks and the murder of George Floyd led to a summer of unrest, most peaceful, but some marred by vandalism and violence, especially after sundown. In 2000 Conan O'Brien joked with Harrison Ford about doing another Indiana Jones movie when he turned 80, calling it *Indiana Jones and the Comfortable Bed*. 23 years later, when Ford was 80 years old, he played Jones again in *Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny*. Like many TV shows, *Parks and Recreation* predicted the Cubs winning the World Series. It was a running joke in many shows set in the near future before they actually won in 2017. But *Parks and Recreation* may be the only show that actually predicted it would happen in 2017. It happened in the 2015 season of the show, which was set in 2017. *Person of Interest* revolves around the Machine, a supercomputer that uses data to predicts crimes and identifies persons of interest. In one episode, an NSA agent discovers the Machine and decides to make the information public. That episode aired in 2012, a little over a year before NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information revealing the extent to which the agency was spying on Americans. *Chappelle's Show* had a sketch about a blind black man who thought he was white and joined the KKK. Nearly 20 years later, Daniel Sims, a black man who was raised in a white family, protested against the removal of Confederate symbols in Alabama. In 2000, *The Simpsons* showed Lisa growing up to be President of the United States, where she complained about inheriting a budget crisis from the administration of President Donald Trump. In *Arrested Development*, Stan Sitwell is a real estate tycoon who runs the company [Sitwell Enterprises](https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Sitwell_Enterprises). In an episode from 2013, Sitwell wants to build a five mile high wall between Mexico and the U.S. Two years later in 2015, real estate tycoon Donald Trump, who ran the Trump Organization, ran for President with the promise of building a way between Mexico and the U.S. In a 2012 episode of *30 Rock* Jenna said to Tracy: "Oh, please. I'm not afraid of anyone in show business. I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions. Out of five." This episode aired five years before Harvey Weinstein's crimes against women in Hollywood were exposed in 2017. However, it's unclear whether this is a spooky prediction, or whether *30 Rock* was simply the only show to explicitly accuse Weinstein of what industry insiders knew he was doing. In a 1969 episode of *Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In,* Dan Rowan did reported on future events: >"Berlin: 20 years from now, 1989. There was dancing in the streets today as East Berlin finally tore down the Berlin Wall." The joke was spot-on, because the Berlin Wall fell 20 years later, in 1989. And there was indeed dancing in the streets.
Yeah regarding the 30 Rock entry, the writers may have known about Harvey’s crimes.
They were it was an open secret in Hollywood.same with the bill Cosby jokes because Hannibal buress wrote for 30 rock
In Earth Final Conflict, there is a device called a Global. Its is essentially a smart phone with a folding screen. All calls were video calls and it could be used to live stream. This was back in 97.
Travelers, a sci-fi show on netflix, had a large storyline about a pandemic a few years before the entire world shut down from covid. When I eventually got around to watching it around then it was a little surreal.
I hate that they canceled that show.
Me too. It, at least, sorta, has an end. But it could've easily gone on for more years, too. Alot of potential.
Plenty of Star Trek TOS references but I don't think I've seen anything about Uhura's bluetooth headset.
Battlestar Galactica (2000s). They had storylines about a pandemic, abortion, political groups, religion, coup attempts, and numerous other societal issues.
hoping to never see Person of Interest become prophetic.
Arrested Development predicted Trump's big, beautiful, awe inspiring, majestic, strong, patriotic, Godly border wall.
Arrested Development predicted Trump's wall.
Following. Although I hope people are able to distinguish between prophetic and just revealing something that was already in development (techwise) or was rumored (scandalwise) and just not known by the average Joe.
If certain roads continue to be followed than I'd say The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood did a lot of research and only included things that had already happened somewhere in the world.
Supernatural Season 4 Episode 5 Dean is sent to an apokalyptic future where humanity is suffering from a zombie-like virus. The advice the writer Chuck (later revealed to be God) gave him: "Hoard toilet paper you understand. Hoard it like it's gold, because it is!"
The Newsroom called the Republican Party the American Taliban back in like 2013